Review: Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke"

Last year Americans were transfixed by Ken Burns' mega-documentary The War which told the story of World War
II from the perspective of ordinary American soldiers. We were told that this
was a Necessary War, and the heroic sacrifice of everyday Americans
saved civilization. This is the narrative that we all find familiar and
comforting. But what if World War II was not necessary, and what if it
really ushered in the end of civilization? That is the perspective of
Nicholson Baker's astonishing book Human
Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

Baker is a fellow Mainer, and lives just a few towns over from me. He has
made a name for himself as a literary minimalist with unusual novels such as The
Mezzanine and A Box of Matches. But he is also a passionate
collector of old print newspapers, including the New York TImes, the
vanished New York Herald Tribune, and 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers
from the British Library. The thing is, Baker didn't just collect these
old newspapers, he also started to read them. And in the process of
reading old newspapers from 1920 on, he discovered that a different narrative
for the origins of world war is possible - a narrative that often goes
against the grain of everything we thought we knew.

Baker is not a historian, and Human Smoke is not a book of history -
or, at least not the kind of history to which we are accustomed. In fact, the
book has enraged many historians. Baker has taken newspaper clippings,
excerpts from memoirs and diaries, snippets from official documents - in short,
a collage of historical facts - and arranged them in meticulous chronological
order. The author has retreated behind the facts, and surfaces only at
the very end, in the Afterword.Human Smoke ends on December 31,
1941, before the climax of the Final Solution, the firebombing of Dresden and
the atomic bomb, but the forces that led to this total destruction have been
set in motion.

Through his pointillistic technique, Baker creates an alternative narrative
comprised of inconvenient facts. We see the mild anti-Semitism of Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt, and the virulent anti-Semitism of Churchill. Churchill, in
particular, emerges here as the consummate warmonger, eager to firebomb German
civilians, willing to starve all of Europe with a naval blockade while
suspending civil liberties at home. Meanwhile, Roosevelt is pushing America to
war with Japan through deliberate provocation: the "surprise" attack
at Pearl Harbor does not in retrospect seem to have been a surprise at all.
Anecdotes featuring Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler are juxtaposed with
speeches and letters of Gandhi, as well as articles about peace activists and
conscientious objectors. The heroes of Bakers alternate narrative are the
forgotten pacifists, humanists such as Herbert Hoover, who railed against the
food embargo, and survivor/witnesses such as Victor Klemperer.
Baker acknowledges these unsung heroes in his Afterword:

“I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American
and British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried
to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan,
and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.
(Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke).

Baker has been eviscerated in the press for his book. Adam Kirsch (whose
poetry criticism I greatly admire) attacks Human Smoke in the right-wing
New York Sun as "stupid"
and "scary". But Kirsch is dishonest when he asserts that
Baker shares Goebbel's opinion of Churchill (he doesn't) And neoconservative
author and columnist Anne Applebaum becomes apoplectic with rage when
contemplating Baker in The
New Republic. Baker is an easy target for historians. But what
Applebaum fails to realize is that what Baker has created with Human Smoke is
not history, but rather agit-prop. The alternative narrative he has woven
with his collage of inconvenient facts sticks in the mind, and our black and
white "understanding" of WWII begins to fade to gray.